Search Worlds Without End

This novelette originally appeared in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, June 1989 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2011. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection (1990), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection The John Varley Reader (2004).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Ten years ago this season, Gregory Maguire wrapped up the series he began with Wicked by giving us the fourth and final volume of the Wicked Years, his elegiac Out of Oz.

But "out of Oz" isn't "gone for good." Maguire's new series, Another Day, is here, twenty-five years after Wicked first flew into our lives.

Volume one, The Brides of Maracoor, finds Elphaba's granddaughter, Rain, washing ashore on a foreign island. Comatose from crashing into the sea, Rain is taken in by a community of single women committed to obscure devotional practices.

As the mainland of Maracoor sustains an assault by a foreign navy, the island's civil-servant overseer struggles to understand how an alien arriving on the shores of Maracoor could threaten the stability and wellbeing of an entire nation. Is it myth or magic at work, for good or for ill?

The trilogy Another Day will follow this green-skinned girl from the island outpost into the unmapped badlands of Maracoor before she learns how, and becomes ready, to turn her broom homeward, back to her family and her lover, back to Oz, which--in its beauty, suffering, mystery, injustice, and possibility--reminds us all too clearly of the troubled yet sacred terrain of our own lives.

The Oracle of Maracoor, the second in the trilogy called Another Day, continues the story of Elphaba's green-skinned granddaughter, Rain. That strange land, Maracoor--across the ocean from Oz--is beset by an invading army. In the mayhem, Rain and Cossy, a child felon, break out of prison. Helped by a few flying monkeys, they struggle to escape the city before it falls under siege. Their arresting officer, Lucikles, also retreats with his family to a highland redoubt. But safety eludes them all. Chaos thunders upon them in the form of warriors, refugees, and brigands. The very fabric of reality loosens, liberating creatures of myth and legend--huge blue wolves, harpies, and giants made of the very landscape.

Cued in by secrets known only to the most highly placed members of the royal court, Rain and her companions hunt the fabled Oracle of Maracoor for guidance and soothsaying. Rain has to recover her forgotten past if she is to consider returning home. Cossy, the ten-year-old convicted of murder, must become invisible to avoid being taken into custody again. Meanwhile, the Fist of Mara, an arcane artifact that renders all around it barren, hammers against human lives. If the reclusive Oracle should spin a prophecy, might the desperate wicked years promise another day, one less perilous?

Following a confrontation with her reclusive great-grandfather, the one-time Wizard of Oz, Rainary Ko--the granddaughter of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West--has re-upped in a mission to settle a few scores and right a wrong or two. Her memory and her passions reviving, Rain turns her gaze back to her native Oz. Though the Grimmerie, which she had cast into the sea, retains its arcane power over her, the lover she left behind in Oz proves no less haunting. Traveling companions and arrivistes can befuddle a young witch coming into her own, but Rain marshals a steely determination to stare her troubles in the eye and see who blinks first.

In the Another Day cycle, a lost young woman grows through a cautious adolescence into an adult state of fervor and daring. Enchantment imprisons and it also liberates. Pay heed, pay respect, but above all, pay attention.

There's a new sheriff in town, and he's got the Nightside's rich and powerful quaking in their boots. He's The Walking Man, and it's his mission to exorcise sinners-with extreme prejudice. Problem is, the Nightside was built on sin and corruption, and The Walking Man makes no distinction between evildoers and those simply indulging themselves. He'll leave the place a wasteland unless someone stops him, and P.I. John Taylor has been handed the job. No known magic or science can affect The Walking Man, and if John can't discover his weakness, he'll be facing the very Wrath of God...